About Red Camellia
Built by a woman who kept going anyway
Red Camellia exists because the trips we wanted were not being designed by anybody, and the people selling them kept treating a woman travelling alone as a problem to be solved rather than a client to be served.
Our story
It started with a travel agent telling me to take a friend
In 2016 our founder walked into an agency to book a ski week in the Bernese Oberland. She was asked, twice, whether her husband would be joining. When she said she was going alone the conversation turned to a group departure aimed at people twenty years older, on the reasonable assumption that a woman on her own must be looking for company rather than a mountain.
She booked it herself instead, badly and expensively, and had one of the best weeks of her life. Then she did it again in Uzbekistan, in Sri Lanka, in Japan, across twelve Disney parks in under eighty hours, and eventually on a train from Pretoria to Dar es Salaam. Somewhere around the eighth or ninth of these it stopped being a hobby and started being a body of knowledge.
Red Camellia was built out of that. Not a booking service with a women-focused label attached, but a design practice run by somebody who has personally worked out which overnight trains are fine, which operators cut corners on avalanche training, and which hotel dining rooms make a woman eating alone feel like an administrative inconvenience.
We are small on purpose. We take a limited number of itineraries a year because the alternative is selling trips we have not personally stood in, and that is the one thing the business will not do.
Mission
To design the trip a woman actually wants, and remove every reason she has been given for not taking it.
That means the logistics, the guiding, the single supplement and the safety questions, handled properly and in advance. It also means the quieter work: telling a fifty-eight year old that off-piste is not beyond her, and being right about it.
Vision
A travel industry where a woman arriving on her own is entirely unremarkable.
Parts of the world worked this out centuries ago. The Silk Road has been receiving solo travellers since before most European capitals existed. We would like the booking industry to catch up, and in the meantime we intend to make ourselves the proof.
Values
Four things we will not trade away
- Boldness
- We are not here to talk you down to something more sensible. If you want the Caucasus rather than the Alps, we will tell you what it takes and then we will build it.
- Candour
- Honest advice, including when it costs us the booking. We will tell you a destination is wrong for your dates, that an operator is not worth the premium, or that you are not fit enough yet and here is how long it takes.
- Rigour
- Every supplier vetted in person, every guide met, every hotel slept in. If we have not been there, we say so and we find somebody who has.
- Belonging
- Solo is designed for rather than tolerated. No punitive single supplements where we can negotiate them away, and no dining rooms where a woman on her own is treated as a seating problem.
What makes us different
Why women come to us rather than a booking site
Bespoke itineraries, not departures
We hold no fixed catalogue. Each route is drawn for the woman taking it, which is why two clients asking for Uzbekistan in the same month receive genuinely different trips. Pacing, difficulty, how much of the day is left deliberately empty: all of it is a decision rather than a default.
Designed with you, not at you
The first draft is a conversation starter and we expect it to change. Most trips get shorter during this stage rather than longer. You see the costing itemised, including where we think you should spend more and where a cheaper option is genuinely the better one.
A global network of specialists
Heli operators in the Caucasus and the Canadian Rockies, guides across Central Asia and the Balkans, mobile safari camps in East Africa, rail specialists on three continents. Most of our guides are women. All of them are people we have travelled with ourselves rather than found in a directory.
Built by a solo traveller
Our founder has spent more than a decade travelling alone, much of it in places where women are told not to go on their own. She also holds a Guinness World Record for visiting twelve Disney parks in under eighty hours, which tells you something about the logistical obsession behind every itinerary we write.
Come and tell us where you have always meant to go
The first conversation is ninety minutes and costs nothing. Bring the trip you have been putting off, and the reason you have been putting it off.
